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On February 11 2012, Whitney Houston was found in a bathtub at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, drowned due to drug intoxication. When Cat Marnell, the New York party animal and blogger, heard the news, she took her own cocktail of drugs, sat down, and wrote perhaps her finest piece yet.

In “On the death of Whitney Houston: why I won’t ever shut up about my drug use,” Marnell, a 29-year-old former beauty editor, ditched the bravado that had characterised many of her articles on addiction. “Look how easy it is, even when you are Whitney f---ing Houston, to withdraw your voice and pretend like you’re a good girl and not mention that you’re using,” she wrote. “To slip silently into the water. To disappear.”

Cat Marnell's How To Murder Your Life does not follow the arc of many drug memoirsCredit:
Christos Katsiaouni

The article, published on the website XoJane.com, was a hit, and Marnell found herself under intense scrutiny. Profiles began to appear in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal of this beautiful, drug-addicted wild child.

Nothing titillates us more than a slow-motion car crash, and Marnell narrated hers in style. “Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night,” she told the New York Post, “when I could be on the rooftop of [New York nightclub] Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust.”

Marnell was out of control, on amphetamines, ecstasy, PCP, crack cocaine, heroin – anything, frankly, with a chemical formula that whacked you around the chops. She left XoJane.com and began writing erratic columns for Vice, such as “That time Lindsay Lohan wouldn’t do drugs with me” and “Cocaine freak-outs are only made worse by grizzly old bums who smell of urine”. It seemed a matter of time before Marnell suffered the same fate as Whitney Houston.

Almost five years later, though, and Marnell has not disappeared. There were times, she admits, when the drug use was so heavy, the insomnia and paranoia so crippling, that she “officially bowed out of the game of life”. But Marnell, now 34, has recovered to write this extraordinary account of sexual abuse, bulimia, wanton self-destruction – a youth as chaotic and hazardous as a smashed bottle of uppers.

How to Murder Your Life does not follow the arc of many drug memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Yes, there is a happy ending of sorts but in the final pages she admits that she’s still far from being clean – “there’s a bottle of Adderall right next to me”.

She also does precious little preaching. In fact, any advice Marnell does offer is best ignored: “Here’s a life lesson for you kids: it’s much easier to go through something upsetting when you’re on drugs.” Let’s hope she knows a good lawyer.

Cat Marnell is brazenly unapologetic for the wild ride she has enduredCredit:
FilmMagic

Like Hunter S Thompson and William Burroughs, Marnell is brazenly unapologetic for the wild ride she has endured. She delights in shocking the reader and at every turn dares us to disapprove. Rehab is somewhere to “recharge her batteries”; the suburb of Washington DC where she grew up is “so white that you could practically snort it like a line”. She describes her drug use with just-try-and-stop-me flippancy: “You know how it is: some graffiti kid leaves piles of skag on your coffee table and the next thing you know you’re high and listening to the Contagion soundtrack in your underpants for six straight hours.”

Marnell is, undeniably, a petulant, privileged white girl, whose family picked up the bill as she cavorted around town, blowing every chance of redemption along the way. She even persuaded her 81-year-old grandmother to send her $3,000 (£2,400), most of which she spent immediately on drugs.

But Marnell writes with such peppery vim and so little self-pity that you can forgive her. For all the glib asides, for all the parties and champagne, she is acutely aware of how isolated addiction made her. “Who could I call?” she writes. “I scrolled through my phone. I had psychiatrists; I had coke dealers; I had f--- boys. Why didn’t I have any friends?” Marnell would be the first to admit that, for a long time, she really didn’t deserve any.